How we'll accomplish our goal
Objectives and Strategies
Evaluate and improve programs and policies to enhance access, opportunity, and diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, experiences, and ideas throughout the university community.
- Launch a comprehensive evaluation of university policies and procedures to identify and address gaps related to access, opportunity, and diversity, ensuring compliance with state and federal requirements.
- Expand institutional programming and promote individual engagement in activities focused on cultural and global competency.
- Evaluate and improve student transition and orientation programming to foster a welcoming, respectful environment that promotes civic dialogue.
- Identify and address gaps in mentoring and recognition programs to build a greater sense of community for all individuals.
- Centralize reporting of sexual assault, misconduct, bias, discrimination, and harassment to include multiple checks and balances to the reporting and investigative processes.
Promote expansion and campuswide awareness of physical spaces and resources that provide dedicated support and foster a sense of community for students, faculty, and staff.
- Assess accessibility of physical spaces on campus and prioritize needed improvements.
- Expand and increase awareness of physical spaces and resources that provide strategic engagement.
- Expand and increase awareness of opportunities for the campus community to learn across perspectives and experiences.
Use best practices and data-driven, evidence-based policies and procedures to retain talented students, faculty, and staff from a wide-range of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
- Identify factors contributing to students, faculty, and staff leaving the institution, and develop plans to reduce attrition.
- Coordinate and optimize the use of existing retention programs informed by best practices.
Develop a process for communicating and elevating the institution’s values related to access, inclusion, and opportunity for all through a unified campuswide strategy, narratives, content, and promotion.
- Assess the feasibility of a hub-and-spoke communications model to better coordinate messaging related to access and opportunity and share best practices across colleges and central administrative units.
- Embrace, communicate, and promote university core values in messaging.
Providing access to high-impact opportunities is essential to the University of Iowa’s mission and plays a key role in each of the strategic priority areas, with attention to the myriad ways that access is foundational to excellence in teaching, research, and service.
The university is dedicated to transparency, communication, collaboration, and accountability as it seeks to provide a welcoming and respectful environment in which individuals from a wide-range of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences have a sense of belonging and the ability to achieve their potential.
